Quick Tip

It's tomato season!!! Very little excites me more than tomato season-except maybe the idea of a threesome with Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart-but I digress.

As noted before, I'm busy busy busy. Refinishing floors, play practice, work etc. Food remains a high priority for me and I've had to get really creative to eat well because all of my cookware is packed in a POD on my front lawn. It's terrible. I miss my tongs! Yet nothing will stop me from enjoy tomato season. NOTHING! Here is a nice little tip for a lunch salad. In the morning, slice some tomatoes into bite size pieces (I really like using cherry tomatoes and cutting them in half for this application) and place in a small plastic baggie. Add a tablespoon of olive oil and salt and pepper to taste. Pack up some salad greens into a Tupperware container. By lunch, the salt will have pulled some of the tomato juice from the tomatoes, creating a lovely little tomatoy-olive olivey syrup in the bottom of the baggie. Pour the tomatoes and the syrup over your greens. Enjoy!

I love the simplicity of greens, tomatoes, salt, pepper, and olive oil, but if you like a few more flavors, add some of your favorite herbs- rosemary would be nice, and/or some vinegar of choice to the marinade.

Since it is tomato season, I'll also give you my aunt's recipe for oven roasted tomatoes. I use this every time I have too many tomatoes and I need to get them into storage.

Oven Roasted Tomatoes

8-15 medium sized tomatoes, cut into chunks and lightly squeezed over the sink to remove most of the seeds and some of the juice

1 onion, sliced

4 cloves garlic, minced

2 tablespoons olive oil

salt and pepper to taste

Preheat oven to 315 degrees. Toss all of the above into an 8X12 casserole dish, stir to combine and evenly distribute. Bake 2 hours or until a good deal of the juice has cooked out and the tips of the veggies are slightly darker. Allow to cool. Pour into a freezer bag and label and freeze.

You can add any flavors you like to this. Toss in a red pepper! Add basil! More onion? Less garlic? No problem. This is a customizable recipe if ever there was one. Also, you might like it baked longer or shorter, experiment with temperatures if you like. It's easy easy easy.

During the winter, I mainly use this as a sauce for pasta. I'm sure it would be good in chili, stuffing for meat, spooned over chicken...the sky is the limit.